It's easy to forget these days, when pin-up models regularly sport N.E.S. tattoos and cosplaying is more synonymous with cheesecake than living in basements, but there was a time when being a geek was a social stigma. This stigma was especially strong with table top gamers, who were known for obsessively collecting dice, confusing real life with epic campaigns, and putting everything on graph paper. Or, as my Senior Advisor said in my High School Yearbook , "Dave you are a cool guy, you should ditch that D&D stuff and get some chicks".

However, back in the 90s, Nine Inch Nails, Anne Rice's vampire chronicles, and D&D all had a bastard child named Vampire: the Masquerade, and suddenly everything changed. Goth clubs started hosting live action roleplays (LARPs to us gamer nerds). People played RPGs at coffeehouses while smoking clove cigarettes. For the first and only time the local RPG convention became overrun with goth girls wearing vampire fangs and/or fox tails. It was a strange, confusing time to be an RPG geek for sure.

This new generation of RPGs was intended to concentrate on stories and moral decisions rather than smiting enemies and gathering treasure. The books were splendid at invoking their gothic-punk atmosphere with art, writing, and bits of song lyrics. However, their mechanics could be a bit slippery and the books became infamous for meta plots involving sometimes ridiculous characters, weird cosmic events, and vampires wearing trench coats carrying katanas and/or paired desert eagles.

Concept and mechanics slippage led to multiple reboots of White Wolf's core lines over the years (particularly Mage, their book about modern occult practitioners) and eventually led to a book that ended the game universe followed by a new, more subtle line called the New World of Darkness. The New World of Darkness (now published by Onyx Path) tried hard to curb the excesses of the old editions, maybe a little too hard as many believed a bit of the joy was gone from the old game. That, coupled with the decay of table top popularity in general led to a successful game line that had far less cultural impact than the old one.

That was 2004 - 2012. But, this year, we are seeing a new version of the New World of Darkness. And this is why you should care:
1. We Aren't Tired of Vampires Yet

There's a new Dracula television series on the way, all full of darkness and hot girls and a bit of metro-sexuality and science wherein Dracula pretends to be Tesla, or something. Jonathan Rhys Meyers is in it, and he also was in The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones, which came out this year... and has more vampires! Also, as you know, that pensive pale girl and the sparkly guy over in Twilight land.

100% Sparkle Free!

Vampires seem bigger than ever, which is funny since it has been true most of my life. This starts to give me the impression that vampires will grow ever more famous as I live on until all the TV shows have vampires. Which I heartily endorse by the way as vampires basically make everything better.

World of Darkness games let you play these characters, and not in the sense of 'a vampire can fly 6 inches above the ground and drink your blood in ten minutes', I mean, that is part of the game, but more important is all of the angsty bits. Angsty bits are fun because if vampires don't have angst they're basically zombies, and we're all sick of zombies. To be a World of Darkness vampire, you still have to drink blood, but if you aren't really nice about it or lose your vampire temper (which is a constant danger) you end up degenerating to a serial killer, and then a dribbling idiot fast. You have your powers but you hate them, too. It's sort of like me and my terrifyingly powerful charisma.

2. World of Darkness is Staying in Touch with Its Fans

The RPG publishing industry is shrinking. The only company around who manages much of a corporate front these days is Dungeons & Dragons (owned by Hasbro). This is, in some ways, a good thing. Unlike comics where the people in charge seem to hate their audience for not being kids, the RPG industry has generally adjusted well to serving adults and people who have expectations. They have a playtest blog, where they post new stuff from the games and ask for feedback. They interact more with their customers and generally give a feeling that they care.

Tickets are still available! There will be hot goth girls there. I swear.

Nonetheless, World of Darkness is still big enough to have its own convention, LA By Night, as well as a Grand Masquerade. (It's in L.A. this year, and I'm going! Huzzah!) The publisher, Onyx Path, also has a strong Facebook presence, and have even been good about freebies lately, releasing a preview of the new Vampire for free as well as all rules changes for the new books on PDF. Communication is really important these days (or so I keep hearing in marketing meetings) and World of Darkness has it pretty well covered. I doubt @WWpublishing is going to crush Twitter any time soon, unless they take up twerking, but you can find them if you need them.
3. The Goths Are Getting Old

Now Vampire is the RPG of the Goth generation, which is widely understood to have started up along with The Smiths and The Cure, which was kind of a long time ago. And while though those of us with Goth leanings like vampires and all that eternal beauty and youth stuff, the fact is that Robert Smith looks a bit bedraggled these days. Don't get me wrong, he looks great for being above half a century, but none of us are getting any younger. For example, Bar Sinister is one of my favorite places to be on the rare nights the wife and I can get sitting for the daughter and doggy, then sneak up to Hollywood. But the fact is... it involves a lot of dancing and climbing stairs. These things aren't great for old folks necessarily.

Wikimedia Creative Commons

Well, he certainly looks undread now.

What's my point? Well, the great thing about roleplaying is that you can do it while sitting down. Heck, it's not like rolling dice is so exerting. And how much easier is it to say "my character goes to the club and dances for hours, her perfect body moving in time to the bass as all around her are entranced" than to actually, you know, get in shape and go to a club and entrance anyone? It's MUCH easier if you have other obstacles than fitness and spare time such as being overweight, hairy, a man, or an overweight hairy man. Although if you keep doing things like that, Steve, no one will want to sit next to you at the next convention.
4. More Modern Rules

Fate is a rival roleplaying system that just had a kick-ass Kickstarter. They invented a new kind of roleplaying game that uses far less detail to keep track of. Say you want to hack a computer. Now, and I'm simplifying, but basically there is a spectrum between having a ten page chapter in the book related to hacking that involves charts, times, and consequences to failure, and having a game where you say 'I hack it' and the person running the game says 'ok.' I would call the really detailed stuff simulationist and the really loosey-goosey stuff narrative. (I'm wincing a bit when I write this because it is a terrible over simplification, and I imagine the site coming under the angry fire of people who take this stuff more seriously than I do. But I think it works).

So, Fate is all about the narrative side, where you roll dice and you succeed or fail, and everything else you fill in with neat story bits. Now, the World of Darkness setting has always been much crunchier than that. However, the new books are more of a fusion, adding more loosey-goosey character stuff, like personal goals and rewards for failure on top of the more straightforward "be a vampire and don't die" stuff. I think this is good because though I like FATE, I think at times it can be too simplified. My brain likes things such as different guns doing different damages while FATE might just say "your weapon is just window dressing, its attacking someone that matters". I am, as mentioned, a classic geek. I've only fired a gun once in my life, but I know a fair amount them because details in RPGs add those nice bits of semi-realism that can help you get past the vampires and the fire breathing robots and junk that litter your average RPG.

Vampires have guns now. It's a thing.

Trivia Note! The makers of Underworld were sued by White Wolf Publishing for being too similar to their World of Darkness setting! True Story!

I feel like the first half of that article David was essentially flipping the finger at all the people that still play WoD and making a lot of assumptions about the lifestyle of those people. I was sitting there saying "If I'm not an aging goth, don't read Anne Rice religiously, nor am I a socially awkward 90's childhood survivor, can I still enjoy this system or is that not acceptable?"

Concerning Zombies and RPGs. I urge you to check out the new RPG coming soon from Mark Rein-Hagan. I have never been huge on zombies, but I think the concept and game sound amazing. I am looking forward to checking this out! :)

The Kickstarter is over, but there's a lot of information on there about the game.

As an early 80s goth (a label that was actually assigned to us, not one that we picked), I have to say that Vampire: The Masquerade was perhaps the worst thing to happen to our subculture aside from The Crow and Interview With The Vampire.

After V:TM became popular we saw in influx of new poseurs who (for some reason) thought "goth = vampire" and thus the actual goth subculture died, and the vampire babies took over. The original goth look was a punk-flavored version of 1920s silent film style crossed with our own artistic touches. The vampire kids turned it into more of a store-bought freakshow with heavy harlequin/vampire makeup and themes.

If anything, most of us old-school goths outright resented V:TM because it brought the one thing we DIDN'T want: A crowd-drawing spotlight on our subculture. We were who we were because we were mostly introverts and artists. Bringing extroverts who liked to play dress-up into the clubs was NOT what we wanted, and as soon as those people took over our hangouts, we left.

V:TM made a pretty good video game, but I never got along with the actual "tabletop" players because all of them that I knew were LARPers who played dress-up and used the game as a pathetic excuse to grope members of the opposite sex. I'm sure that some people actually played the game without the costumes and sad neck-sucking playacting, but I never witnessed the normal "tabletop" players, myself.

I was more of a V&V, Paladium, D&D, GURPS, and TOON fan, anyway.

What was my point? Those "goth clubs" with "goth girls" wearing vampire fangs and fox tails? Those weren't actual goth clubs anymore if that's what was happening. They had already become spoiled and altered by the vampire kids.

Man, I still love White Wolf games, my introduction to table top gaming (after a horrendous false start with D&D).

Thing is with the older (second edition) books, I don't think I ever used them the way you were "supposed" to, as I ignored nearly all the backstory and worldbuilding of the books - I prefer things to be more mysterious for the players, and was not shy about trying to incorporate all of the various games into one session, even if that meant fudging the rules.

Then the New World of Darkness books came out, and they basically said "here's a backstory if you want it, but feel free to ignore it," and they did a lot more to even out the cross-game playing field. Love it.

Why are the first two sentences basically demeaning women in geek culture? If you were trying to build up some in-the-trenches-with-you sort of camaraderie with the reader, there are other ways to do that without implying geeky women are tattooed (not that I think tattoos are bad, but the way it was worded in the article was super unflattering, I think) and women who cosplay are cheesecakey attention whores. And a joke about being a nerd in his mother's basement doesn't save you from the previous implications.

I've played World of Darkness games since I was a teen, and I'm a woman. Vampire was one of my favorite games, since there was such focus on story and it had a rich background tapestry to play with.

David Scott: Thanks for the awesome article! As the guy behind most of the social media for Onyx Path, I'm glad I virtually get my own reason. ;D While there is a lot of overlap with @wwpublishing's account, you may also be interested in OPP's account: @TheOnyxPath

Onyx Path handles White Wolf tabletop properties, while our friends at By Night Studios (@ByNightStudios ) handle live action stuff. OPP's also fully acquired Scion and the Trinity Universe from White Wolf, so we've got new editions of those on the way out too.

So we have the 20th Anniversary Editions of the Classic World of Darkness, the new Chronicle books for the new World of Darkness, new edition of Exalted, new Scion, and new Trinity. It's a good time to be a fan.

As interesting as the God Machine thing is, it cannot possibly replace the original World of Darkness setting for me. I've mentioned this in an reply elsewhere, but as much as I like how the rules for the newer World of Darkness play (and make GMing the game easy), I still miss the original setting and the storylines there. So, while I've not thrown anything towards the newer stuff (or the Exalted kickstarter), I've been a solid supporter of the Anniversary editions of the original books. Very happy to see new, and really nicely put together, versions out there. I'll probably check out the newest reboot stuff at some point if the setting is more interesting.

I see Vampire this, or werewolf that. Frankenstein has had his run. Along with the Mummy. It time to bring Florida's ORIGINAL BADASS BACK! I'm talking about. The Creature from the Black Lagoon! I miss that.

Wait that makes me think. If they have not rebooted it that means one of two things. 1. It is utter garbage, or.2. It is so perfect they can't top it.

I remember one year at DragonCon there was a big Vampire/World of Darkness group generally acting like self-important jackasses and spoiled children, constantly throwing fits when they didn't get their way. They raised a big stink about all the Magic players in the hotel lobby taking up space and complained to the hotel about them ruining the "atmosphere" of their LARP until the hotel made all the Magic players leave just to shut the LARPers up.

The next year about four of the Magic players returned to DragonCon dressed in jester's caps, and spent the entire con photobombing and otherwise ruining the LARPer's weekend. One of the Vampire LARPers would be standing there with his arms crossed and two of the jesters would start bouncing around him pointing at him, or they would just blatantly walk into him and say "Oh sorry man, I didn't see you, you were obfuscating!". The big meeting the cairn had out behind the hotel was interrupted by four jesters blasting "Walking on Sunshine" on an 80s style boom box and inviting people outside to dance with them. All in all it was pretty glorious.

From what I have read about Mummy (since I keep expecting my deluxe edition Any Day Now), no. But when WW announced a new mummy game the reference that came to mind was the old black and white movies and such. Mummy is well done but I think a lot of the cool factor was brought by the creative team instead of being inherent to the concept. Which is actually more impressive, really.

@SkudzMckenzy You can just be warned that most of the people I've ever run into who do enjoy it are much like he described. I was lucky in college to have a gaming group of mostly normal geeks who would play any system or genre so long as they were gaming, so we played some WoD along with a lot of other stuff.

@nix.nightbird I think we're coming at this from different ends and I think you have more of a purist definition than a lot of people do (not that there's anything wrong with that).

But I do agree with you about Palladium. I still have two shelves of Rifts and Heroes Unlimited Books in the off hope that somehow Palladium will go back to being awesome and/or I can convince someone to make Palladium characters.

1) World of Darkness games were a vanguard for female-friendly games in big and small ways like inclusive pronouns, better female NPCs, just a better environment overall.

2) They also made RPGs seem a lot sexier/edgy/grownup in ways that influenced geek culture as a whole.

I was actually referring to the second with the Pinup / Cosplay commentary - I think things like White Wolf changed the world from a place where dressing up as characters and playing RPGs was this totally asexual, man-dominated thing to something where fans of both genders can mix it up and playing video games and RPGs become something people list on their resume to attract other people.

I mean, the whole idea of the fake geek girl sort of amazes me. When I was a kid you'd never think anyone would call themselves a geek and be faking it because it was such a bad thing to be. These days, it makes sense to people.

Cosplay in particular - the only equivalent thing I can think of in the 80s was Trekkies, I guess, and people thought that was pretty weird. These days you have some truly awesome and gorgeous cosplayers out there that really just seem unprecedented in my experience of life so far.

Anyway, long and the short, I was just trying to say that White Wolf made RPGs sort of sexy, at least for a while. I sort of dropped in the female friendly part but didn't do much with it and chose some examples that apparently are inflammatory and I think that clouded things. Wasn't my intention to make fun of/dismiss anyone, though.

As the lifelong gamer wife of the author I didn't see it that way. The point was that pop culture is quickly gobbling up geek culture and mass marketing it in the same way it always has - with sexy women dressed in sexy clothes.

@Kozmik_Pariah Masquerade didn't get retitled and lose clans: Requiem was a new Vampire game with a different set of clans. Now that the 20th Anniversary Edition of Vampire is out, we're publishing both Masquerade and Requiem concurrently.

Masquerade got three editions in its original 13-year run. Requiem's been out for nine years now. About time it got its own rule update, no?

@JimmyBones There's been rumors of a remake for decades, one time it was attached to John Carpenter (how long has it been since he's made a real movie?). Development hell or just no one really gave a damn? Who knows?

Way back in high schoolI got my arm dislocated out of its socket for
blowing the curve on a test once, but since the perp was on the football
team the admin scolded him and I was given an ice pack. I don't think
that level of stigma exists anymore for nerds in the USAlund, but if
anything the geek (niche interest) community is saddled with even more
pressure to conform. Physical violence is mostly replaced with institutionally subtly encouraged passive aggressive behavior - the level of verbal abuse that is now considered "acceptable" is way beyond what would have been tolerated back in my day and it's all in the name of conformity.

@DrAbraxas yeah; realistically the only times it is accepted to be a "nerd" or a "geek" is when a hot chick is prancing around in a out of season Halloween costume with her tits out or when some jack ass is acting like the stereotype and embarrassing the culture.

fuck heroes of cosplay, you want to make a nerd show then do one about "the heroes of fansubbing" or "the market kings of mmos."

@ketsuko Of all the many people I know who play\Love oWOD from multiple countries only one of them was the "goth" archetype, and even then, she much only dressed up on weekends and preferred Legends of the Five Rings, so I too have to jump on the "We're Not All Goths, You Know" Bandwagon.

@dnjscott@loriofpandora I agree with you on your take of the World of Darkness and it's female friendliness. I've played all sorts of systems, and World of Darkness was really inclusive like that. Part of my reaction to the open was probably colored by the whole advent of the "fake geek girl" phenomena, and I was probably taking you more seriously than I should, but I still believe that we have to be careful in what we say about girls in geek culture, just BECAUSE people think the idea of faking geekery when you're female is reasonable. I've personally been on the receiving end of so much "you're not a REAL geek" conversations at conventions and in my career (I am an illustrator that works in the comic industry) that I might be oversensitive.

Your article is overall entertaining and I enjoyed the points you made. And if I came off as really inflammatory myself, I apologize.

@dnjscott@DrAbraxas Oh yeah, BE a geek and it doesn't matter how many other, normally socially acceptable, even commendable things, you that people would normally kiss up to you for doing, you are nothing but a pariah.

@loriofpandora@burgandyskies I think we might actually be on the same page on Heroes of Cosplay? I follow more than a few cosplayers and love their work, but I feel like HoC is being exploitative in how they marketed the show and the cosplayers involved, in order to sell the show to a more mainstream audience.

@burgandyskies Firstly, just because you didn't see it that way does not mean another person won't. It's like one's perception of women in comics. Me personally? I don't mind the sexy costumes and slender ladies with unlikely busts very much. That doesn't mean that another woman reading the same comic can't be upset at the lack of "real women" represented in comics. (for the record, while sexy costumes don't bother me, I prefer it to be something that is relevant to the character. If she WANTS to dress sexy, and that is her choice, great. But I'd love to see more practical women in comics as well. I'm all about balance)

To that end, there's been much talk about women in cosplay sexing it up. Some do sex up characters that aren't inherently sexy, but the vast majority are dressing up as exact replicas of the characters they are portraying. Do we punish women for being accurate to the medium or do we address the problem of too few women in comics being represented in any way other than "hot". Women will cosplay more modest characters once there are more compelling, modest characters to identify with.

And I know some of the girls who participated in Heroes of Cosplay. Like all reality shows, it distills hours of actual life into it's most dramatic and sensationalized sound bites. Almost all of the people I know in the anime and cosplay community either don't watch it, or have turned it into a drinking game. (Every time a girl freaks out about the possibility of Yaya Han cutting them over a missed stitch, take a drink.) Also bear in mind that the cosplayers you see in the show are self-selecting. You're only seeing the ones who agreed to the show and wanted the attention that such a show would bring. It's not representative of the entire cosplay community in the least.

So like I said in response to your husband, and I admire you for standing up for him, by the way, it's not always about your perception of a thing that makes it okay. Sometimes there are unintended consequences to your words or actions, and really all that is is an opportunity to open up a dialogue when misunderstanding happens.